CMS discussions yet again

To: For participants of the Documentation Project <fedora-docs-list redhat com>

Subject: CMS discussions yet again

Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:51:29 -0500

Sparks, jsmith and I were talking in IRC and I thought the
conversation should have a bit wider audience.
I think that while kbase and housing documentation for packaging
guidelines and legal are excellent use cases for a CMS, I wonder if by
trying to use it for everything we are not trying to use a hammer to
drive a screw. My reason for saying that is that it seems like we are
trying to push all of our non-wiki documentation into the CMS, which
at least from my perspectives means we, to one degree or another, are
abandoning DocBook.
For our 'heavy' documents, such as Release Notes, User Guide, and
Security Guide, I don't see an escape from DocBook - it provides a lot
of advantages that just don't exist in a CMS. It does have
disadvantages to be sure, but I guess the question in my mind is with
all of the talk of moving to a CMS are we really prepared to ditch
DocBook and it's benefits? Or is the CMS a solution for things like
Legal and Packaging Guidelines, and potentially a knowledgebase, and
not more?
Thoughts, Comments, Flames?